BEST OF
In an effort to make time for ourselves, many of us fall back on using To Do lists and time blocking. But often these strategies can end up with the same result: getting lost in chasing productivity. So how do we make time for the things that truly count?
Oliver Burkeman is a New York Times bestselling author of books such as ‘Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals’ and ‘Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts’. Oliver is also a regular columnist for The Guardian.
If there is anyone who truly understands the philosophy and psychology of time management and happiness, it’s Oliver.
Oliver shares:
- The mindset you should be using when you first approach a task if you want it to be achieved easily
- How you can free up time by minimising time spent on worrying
- The strategy you should be utilising instead of a to-do list to actually create a sense of achievement
- Why being open to distractions can actually be beneficial
Key Quotes:
“Don’t start from the position that unexpected things happening must be bad.”
“There is this tendency to set things up in your mind so that you can never feel like you’ve done something well enough.”
Connect with Oliver via his website, or get his latest book, Meditations for Mortals, here
My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/
Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au
Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I am on a little break for a few weeks,
so I'm re releasing some of my favorite episodes from
the last twelve months. I will be back with brand
new interviews from July thirty one, and until then, enjoy
today's chat. In an effort to make time for ourselves,
many of us fallback on using to do lists and
time blocking. But often these sorts of strategies can end
(00:24):
up with the same result, getting lost in chasing productivity.
So how do we make time for the things that
truly count Joining me for a third time on How
I Work is Oliver Berkman, one of my favorite writers.
You might have come across Oliver through the international bestseller
four one thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, or his
(00:47):
regular columns for The Guardian, But what I love most
about Oliver's work is that he flips traditional productivity advice
on its head and gives a completely different way of
looking at how we use time. With his new book,
Meditation for Mortals four Weeks to Embrace Your limitations and
Make Time for What Counts, which is out now, Oliver
(01:09):
has been thinking a lot about how we can all
claw back time for the things that really matter. In
this episode. We explore the mindset you should be using
when you first approach a task if you want it
to be achieved easily, and why allowing yourself to be
distracted can actually create a positive result. We also chat
(01:32):
about the strategy you should be utilizing instead of a
to do list if you want to get the most
out of your day. Welcome to How I Work, a
show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day.
(01:52):
I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber. Oliver's new book, Meditation
for Mortals is packed full of wisdom and advice. I
wanted to know of everything that Oliver wrote about, which
pieces of advice really stuck with him and changed him
the most.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I seem not able to write anything other than what
feels most compelling to me on the day that I'm
writing it. And that applies to the whole book in
the sense that, like you know, these are the things
I have to grapple with, and then it applies on
the level of individual chapters through the process of writing
(02:32):
a book, so it feels like the answer that changes
every day basically, but in terms of specifics. This book
is organized into four weeks, as you know, and with
a sort of short chapter per day for each of
those weeks, not that I can control how people actually
read it, but that's the sort of idea. And the
third week in there is called letting Go, and it's
(02:53):
about the importance of learning to sort of let things
happen as a sort of compliment to making them happen,
and kind of unclenching from life a bit. And basically
all of that material is the stuff I sort of
needed the most at the point that I was putting
that together, and you know still now. So all that
stuff about, for example, the willingness to let things be
(03:14):
easy and not to sort of head into big projects
or life stages or anything like that with the kind
of assumption that they must be going to be grueling
and take a lot of unpleasant effort. That means a
lot to me, because it's still one of the ones
that I sort of grapple with the most.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
I suppose I love that I did write that down. Actually,
it's something I wanted to delve into because it's a
question that I sometimes think about, and I've written it here.
What if this might be a lot easier then I'd
been assuming, I think was the wording from the book,
and I was actually curious, like, well, how do you
apply it every day? But I also wanted to know
(03:51):
to this book project, and particularly following up on four
thousand Weeks, which was such a mega hit around the
world world, And I mean, you've written several books, and
so it wasn't like that second album syndrome they talk
about for musicians maybe this is like your fourth or
fifth album syndrome. But I wanted to know for this
project in particular, how did you apply that advice and
(04:13):
did you?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Well, No, it was a bit like second album syndrome,
because you know, it's true that I had written a
previous book, The Antidote, and also a collection of columns
called Help, which was a book and is a book,
But I hadn't had to write in the same way, right,
because it was just a question of collecting and editing
some previously written material. But certainly four thousand Weeks was
far and away the most sort of successful thing that
(04:35):
I'd written at the point that it was published. And
so yeah, I think there was a very sort of cliche,
a completely predictable and rather tiresome to talk too much
about phenomenon where I sort of froze a bit and
thought like, oh dear, now, if I mess up, more
people going to be watching. So I did kind of
a little bit to some extent, sort of freeze and headlights.
(04:55):
And it was interesting because it sort of brought into
my writing process a lot of the questions that I
was already focused on in what I wanted to put
into the book, and it sort of made them very,
very alive. And I've found this in the past, right,
something about the process of writing books will sort of
foreground the things that you're grappling with in the substance
(05:18):
of the book, and actually, you know, you end up,
I think, and I hope being able to express them
more authentically because you actually sort of have to go
through a version of that struggle to get the book written.
And I did have to find ways to allow the
possibility that it was more doable than I thought. But
the basic gist of that was to sort of keep
(05:38):
coming back and back and back. I don't think there's
a single way to flip the switch, but keep coming
back to this thought that maybe what I was ready
to do and able to do in terms of the
next paragraph in the next chapter was what needed to
be done, and now.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Just like in your day to day work, how do
you apply that principle of just having things be a
whole lot easier than you'd otherwise assume.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
I mean, a couple of things come to mind. One
is that I do think and I wish this wasn't
the case, but I do think that a lot of
these insights are just a matter of returning to them
and returning to them and returning to them and gradually
sort of strengthening the mental muscle that allows you to
remember them. So it's sort of catching yourself from one
(06:21):
minute to the next, and it's actually quite sort of
physical for me, right sort of I find that I'm
actually sort of tensed against the work. It's in my
musculature somehow. And catching yourself doing that and just sort
of stepping back from it and thinking like, oh, maybe
that's not necessary is very powerful maybe to get a
little bit more practical. The other thing that makes a
(06:42):
big difference there is the idea of really just thinking
about the very next thing and the very next thing,
so sort of using methods of productivity, methods of planning
the day, and there are lots of different ones that
having common this focus on like, Okay, what's the next small,
completable thing, the sort of radically doable little task that
(07:03):
I want to pick and then put into practice. Now
you can't do things like write a book or even
write a chapter. You can do things like that, come
up with a rough plan for the first half of
the chapter, and that's when I can get it down
underneath that threshold of what feels doable, back into that
easier way of working.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
I love that idea of picking the thing that feels
radically doable that will stick with me. I think something
else that this relates to, and I want to say,
this might have been in the Letting Go section is
around developing a taste for problems, and you write about
how we kind of go through life and think, oh,
(07:42):
one day all the problems will be gone and there
will just be no problems to deal with, but of
course we know that that is not the case. It's
like it's so simple, but it's also it's like it's
quite profound when you actually think about it. I want
to know, like, how does that work and resonate for you,
like on a day to day basis. Is it one
(08:02):
of those things that you do just keep coming back
to because I was very curious about that.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
I write in the book about this story that Sam
Harris tells about, you know, being a coffee. I think
it is at lunch with a friend one day and
going on and on about all the problems he was
addressing in his work or whatever it was, and her
interrupting him in mid flow and saying, hold on, are
you still under the impression you're going to get to
the part of your life where you don't have any problems?
(08:26):
And he sort of recounts the experience of realizing, like, oh, yes,
there is kind of something in the stance I've had
towards life that implies, yeah, not only that a given
problem might be difficult depending on its content, but that
like I shouldn't have problems. I'm trying to get through
to the point in life where there aren't problems. And
I sort of explain in the book why this isn't
(08:48):
going to happen, and you wouldn't want it to happen, right.
There are certainly specific kinds of problems that you wouldn't
wish on anybody, but the sort of sheer existence of
problems on some level is the synonymous of having meaningful work.
Ahead of you, but I try increasingly to have some
kind of direction, have some kind of vision. I don't.
It's not purely about just stumbling through the dark, but
(09:10):
not to try very hard to link that up to
moment to moment action. So I'm really trying. It's very
much a work in progress, but I'm really trying to
combine that idea of like having a fairly clear sense
of what I'm trying to create here with a very
very much more intuitive and spontaneous even sense of like, Okay,
(09:32):
what feels like the right thing to do next.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I want to talk about worrying, and you talk about
this idea of most of the bridges that we worry
about never end up being crossed. Can you tell me
more about that, and just on a day to day basis,
how do you live that? Because I really struggle with
that one.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Yeah, no, me too, And that's why it was interesting
for me to write about it. The It is kind
of fascinating, And I think one way of understanding worry
is that it's the sort of attempt by a human
being who is inherently limited to the present moment. One
of the many ways in which were limited is we're
sort of temporarily localized. We wish we could sort of
(10:16):
also be in the future checking up on it, making
sure that everything's going to be fine, but we can't,
and so worry is this sort of mental discomfort that
arises from trying to repeatedly sort of get out there
and secure a place in time that we're not actually
in and never are in. And you know, if I
wanted to get sort of evolutionary psychology about it, which
(10:39):
I don't usually want to do very much, but you know,
you could see how perhaps we sort of evolved in
an environment where where having that concern and then dealing
with it was something that happened in a very short order.
Like you hear a sound, you're worried about it, you
check it out, you realize it's no threat to your safety.
Now we live in this world that's been called a
you know, delayed return environment, where the thing you're worrying
(11:00):
about could well be whether how an editor will respond
to a pitch you've made sometime in the next four weeks,
or whether an attempt to purchase a house will go
through at some point in the next two months. You know,
all these kinds of slow things, whether worry just has
nowhere to go. It doesn't motivate a quick action to
get to deal with the worry. It just sort of curdle.
And I think the thing about crossing bridges is, yeah,
(11:21):
there's another way of making the same point. Really, we're
trying to sort of think through all the things that
could go wrong, think our way through what we do,
and reassure ourselves that that will have gone okay if
that happens. You can't ever be certain that something goes
okay until it's gone okay. So trying to cross bridges
before you get to them, in that sense, is just
(11:43):
a recipe for that kind of unpleasant, anxious state of constantly,
repetitively trying to do it and failing. There are all
sorts of ideas in cognitive therapy and elsewhere about you know,
scheduling a time of day in which to worry and
things like this, and I think it does help some
people to do something like that. The version of that
that I find helpful is to market date in my
(12:04):
calendar maybe three four weeks in the future, to sort
of remind myself to focus again on that topic. And
I find that knowing that that's there and it's coming
up in the calendar is incredibly powerful in terms of
enabling me to let go of it in the present.
If it's still a big issue four weeks from now,
then I will kick into worrying about it again. I
(12:25):
sort of on some level, I'm concerned that if I
were to stop worrying about it, I might completely forget
about it. Right, And it's wild, right as parents, if
you're worried about some issue with your child's welfare, like,
I'm not going to forget about that, It's ridiculous. But
some part of me doesn't trust myself. And it's like,
if I let go and just got into the thing
I was working on today, maybe like ten years later,
(12:48):
I'd be like, oh, no, everything's gone terribly wrong in
life because I completely failed to attend to this thing.
So putting that kind of three or four weeks ahead
thing in I find really effective because then I can
be like, okay, just in case I completely forget about
this important thing that will come back into my world.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
I love that I've experimented myself with having a worry
list and then setting a daily worry time and confining
my worrying to that time of day, and I found
that quite effective. But what I like about what you've
just suggested is that it's almost like a test of
a hypothesis. And the more and more you're like, if
everything you worry about you actually just put in the
(13:29):
diary to spend some time thinking about a couple of
weeks from today, and then every time you get to
those things, like nine times out of ten, you're going
to think, what was I even worrying about that never
eventuated into anything, which I feel then feeds, you know,
the like a more sensible hypothesis and theory that actually
(13:49):
I worry about things that I don't even need to
be spending time worrying about. So I really I enjoy that.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yes, and even in the one time out of ten, right,
then it comes around and you're like, Okay, what are
some the chances are you'll be in a better place
to just sort of figure out some actions that you
could take relative to it.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Yeah, yeah, now you're right. Even though you're I would
say an anti productivity guru, if that is a thing,
you do have some really good pieces of advice around
how we can I guess, make the best use of
our time and think differently about things. And I want
to talk more about this idea of treating your to
do list as a menu. Can you tell me more
(14:27):
about that?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
So I guess where this started off in my thinking
is in another chapter of this book, where I'm talking
about not to do lists, but like you're sort of
to read pile or your digital folder of articles save
to read later, and how not very much reflection on
how content works in the twenty first century will reveal
(14:49):
that this is essentially an endless list. The better technology
gets at filtering information, the more stuff we find coming
our way that we feel like we really need to
read or would be really important for our jobs or something.
And I wrote then about how it can be really
helpful to see that kind of collection of things not
as a bucket but as a river. Right, So this
(15:10):
is just an possibly helpful analogy, not as something you've
got to sort of deal with an empty but as
a sort of flow of things that goes by you,
and your only job is to pick a few things
that seem interesting and not to feel guilty about the
ones that go by. And I find that very useful
in my own approach to literally that topic. You know,
the four hundred articles that I've got stored in a
(15:32):
read it later app If I think that it's my
job to get through them, firstly, I won't approach them
in the most creatively helpful or enjoyable way. But secondly,
also like, that's not the end of it. There'll be
another four hundred in a short time. So treating them
as like, well, what actually still feels compelling and let
the rest go is much more powerful. But the more
(15:52):
I thought about this, the more I realized that you know,
in a sense, every list of things, even things that
feel much more obligatory than a to read pile, every
list of things has the same character because if there
are more things that you could meaningfully usefully do with
(16:13):
a day, then you will be able to actually do
with the day. Then you are, in fact picking items
for now and letting the rest go, whether you like
it or not. So to switch screech of breaks, to
switch metaphor into menus. The point there is that we
don't get stressed by a rest Most people anyway don't
(16:34):
get stressed by a restaurant menu. And if you do
get stressed, it's not because you think it's your job
to get through the whole list right at a single sitting.
The fact that a restaurant menu is long and you
get to pick a few things from it is kind
of the point of a restaurant menu and what makes
it pleasurable. And you can actually see that the same
thing applies to our to do lists, right because obviously
a lot of the things we're going to be doing
(16:56):
are not necessarily going to be as fun as eating
a delicious meal. But if there's more more that we
could do than we're going to get to do in
a day, then by definition, what you're doing when you
look at a do list is picking a few items
and choosing a few things that feel most compelling, most important,
most meaningful, and not expecting to get through the whole
(17:16):
of it. And there is quite a deep potential shift here,
which is summed up in that sort of familiar phrase.
But it's not that the items on a list, when
you viewed like that, stop being things that you have
to do and become things that you that you get
to do. You get to pick from a menu, and
we do get to pick from our to do lists. Again,
we may decide that certain things that we're going to
(17:39):
pick us kind of unpleasant. In the same way that
I suppose you might pick a extremely healthy side dish
and a menu that you didn't particularly like because actually
it's part of your long term goal to eat healthily.
But there is something really important in letting go of
that notion that you've failed unless you get through the list.
And I think that seeing and understanding our list as
infinite is the way to do that, because then just
(18:00):
like that's not happening.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Something else I really liked as an idea in this
book is around setting a quantity goal. Can you tell
me more about that, because I think that's particularly interesting
for knowledge workers like us.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah, so you know, there are other contexts in which
the idea of quantifying your life and measuring everything you
do can be quite sort of detrimental, and I sort
of don't recommend it, but I'm always one for picking
the right technique for the context and contradicting myself wherever
I feel like it. And the context of quantity goals,
I think that if you do any kind of creative work,
(18:38):
and that I would define very broadly, there is this
tendency to set things up in your mind so that
you can never feel like you've done something well enough,
or that you've done it to a sufficiently high quality.
So the way that you sort of, or the way
that I sort of naturally, if I don't catch myself,
proceeds as a writer is sort of to sit there
(19:00):
staring at the screen waiting for something really good to
occur to me. Finally, maybe it does, and I type
it out, and then I sort of judge it again
and realize it is in. I delete half of it,
and you sort of make this incredibly halting progress over
the page. And it's actually antithetical to high quality anyway,
because the way to get to high quality is to
(19:22):
is to allow things to flow and then pick from
what flows out. So the idea of a quantity goal
is just that it gives the part of your brain
that wants to think in terms of goals and progress
and productivity something to do. But it's something to do
that sort of doesn't get involved in the quality arguments.
So for someone writing, this could be simply a question
(19:43):
of like, my next job is to add two hundred
words to this, or my next job is to write
for an hour today, or you know. And the most
sort of purely quantity form of this is the kind
of free writing exercise that I was talking about before,
where you might just say, like, I'm setting a timer
for ten minutes, and the only rule is that I'm
(20:04):
not going to stop typing or writing for that ten minutes,
and you know that is not going to create the
final draft of a publishable book. But that's not the point.
The point is to stay in this world of letting
things flow out to see what there might be to
be worked with. So I find there's something really sort
of something that really sort of removes the drama from
(20:28):
things by setting a quantity goal, because the other problem
with the quality goal is that it's really hard to express,
like what does it even mean to say, I'm going
to try and write this chapter as well as I
possibly can, or really excellently, or as well as the
last one. These are just kind of endlessly flexible definitions
that you will by default flex in the direction of
(20:48):
feeling bad about yourself. Yeah. So, I'm very often in
my creative work, either sometimes literally writing it down, sometimes
it's just in my mind, but I'm thinking, like, Okay,
what I'm doing now next is a twenty minute brain
dump on this topic. What I'm doing next is filling
a single page with a little structure diagram because that's
(21:11):
how I work. But the point about the quantity there
is it's like filling a single page. It's not getting
the perfect structure, and so on and so on.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
We will be back with Oliver soon and when we return,
we'll be discussing why being open to distractions can be
beneficial and the strategy you can use instead of a
to do list to make the most of your day.
If you're looking for more tips to improve the way
you work can live. I write a short weekly newsletter
(21:39):
that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally.
You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com.
That's Amantha dot com. I feel like this dovetails perhaps
into running a done list at the end of the day,
(22:00):
and I think it's fairly self explanatory perhaps, but maybe
I'd love you to talk about how you use a
done list and perhaps what it is in your work.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, I would say, well as a list you keep
through the day, probably rather than necessarily just at the
end of the day. So, and this is very adaptable.
You know, if there are people listening and watching who
have really complicated, tricked out task management systems like I'm
not suggesting throwing that away. It's just a question of
building this in and making sure that it's got a role,
just a role for recording proactively for things that you
(22:32):
do as you do them, so that you as well
as a to do list, or instead of a to
do list, you're also creating this list of your accomplishments
through the day that gets longer and longer as the
day goes on, which I mean to do lists often
tend to get longer and longer as the day goes
on as well, but that's a problem. This is a
good thing, right, the longer you have done with better
And as I've say in the book, you know, it's
(22:54):
a very simple intervention, but I think it is so
powerful because it invites you to compare your output, not
to infinity, which is what we're usually doing, that all
the things we could yet do that would be useful
if we could do them, but to zero. It's implicitly
it's like, you know, here's what I've done compared to
if I stayed in bed and done nothing today. So
(23:17):
you know, I definitely cycle through the ways I'm actually
doing this in my own life, and actually, maybe that's
something to talk about I'm glad that I do that
now I'm not in search of the final rigid system
in the way that I definitely used to be. But
one way that you can put this into practice, obviously
is just writing. Is just you know, adding items to
(23:39):
a piece of paper as you go through them. If
I'm in more of a sort of a motivational rut,
I will sometimes pair this with another approach. So what
I'll do is, I'll it's going to sound very silly
when I put it into words, but you know, I
will in a notebook, on one page, write down a
task that I to do, do the task, cross it out,
(24:04):
and then write it down on a different page as
being done. Right, so you have a list of the
things that you're doing. You just added one task at
a time, and then a list of the things that
you've done. I mean, I'm willing to be told that
this is kind of dumb on some level, but I
find it it's really it's really helpful for just sort
of focusing when you're feeling like you lack focus, and
(24:26):
just finally on the done list. I mean, one thing
that people have said and that I think I have
once or twice found myself as well, is that if
you're in a really low place, like if you're really
in a kind of like I can't quite make myself
get out of bed kind of psychological place in life,
which does happen, you can just lower the bar for
what counts as something to be added to your done list. Right,
there is something weirdly motivational, something that gets the ball
(24:50):
rolling about keeping a list in a notebook where you say,
you know, took a shower, made coffee, things that you
wouldn't normally qualify as counters accomplishments because two below the
level of significance. But if you do that, you know
you don't need to show anyone else this list. You can.
You can burn it at the end of the day,
and very swiftly people find that it snowballs. Right that
(25:11):
you find that if you see, oh, actually, okay, this
narrative inside me that says I'm totally useless, I've already
done like five effective things today, and yeah, maybe one
of them was brush my teeth, but like, okay, maybe
two or three hours later, I'll have graduated to answering
some emails.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
That's so good. Something that I was thinking about after
I read it around. You know, there's a section around
staying distractible, which of course is the antithesis to a
lot of productivity advice out there. And I know that
you're a fan of Cal Newport in deep work and
the idea of having blocks of uninterrupted, deep focused time.
(25:52):
So I was really curious as to how do you
apply this idea of being open to distractions and interruptions
rather than feeling frustrated with them or with children that
come in and interrupt work.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
I mean, yeah, it's funny, I sort of. I did
a podcast with Cal just a few weeks ago, and
I sort of really enjoy exploring this sort of tension point.
The conversation between us tends to be like I say, like, well,
you know, but it's really grueling and hard to try
to impose that level of schedule of your life, and
Colsponts is like, yeah, but it's worth it. So, like,
you know, buck up. On some level, this is not wrong.
(26:31):
I'm not sort of against the deep work approach. I'm
not against time blocking in the sense that he teaches
it at all. A lot of this is to do
with navigating against one's personality and figuring out where you're
most likely to sort of get too rigid and clamp
down and taking the opposite approach as a kind as
an antidote to that. So, but what I'm talking about
(26:51):
there is this notion that it's really easy, I think,
or for some people people like me, to kind of
make things worse for themselves by trying to sort of
stick to a schedule so rigid that more things get
defined as distractions, and distractions all feel worse when they
do happen, or interruptions, And that distraction, I guess, is
(27:14):
an internal kind of interruption, and then the other kind
is people coming into the room or whatever. So the
example I give him the book. You know, if it's
an afternoon when it's not my turn for school pickup
and I'm working at home and my son burst into
the room to tell me about something that he's done
at school that day, there might be contexts where the
right thing for me to do is to stop and
(27:35):
take a breath and explain that actually, I can't listen
right now and I will be free later. That I
might be working on something urgent, I might be in
a conversation with somebody. This could happen in the next
five minutes it'll be interesting to see. But I don't
want to have a productivity system that has defined this
period as so importantly devoted to rigid focus that by definition,
(28:00):
that lovely thing that life is supposed to be about
is defined as a problem. I'm not saying it will
never be something that needs to be managed in that way,
but like, don't default to that. Don't start from the
position that unexpected things happening must be bad. I think
that is the risk of sort of overly investing in schedules. Obviously,
(28:20):
there'll be people in the audience here who may say, well,
you know, my schedule is you know, there are lots
of professional roles in which your schedule is more dictated
than that, right, if you've got appointments, if you're working
as a teacher, or working in sort of lots of
different settings where there's kind of a scheduled aspect to it.
But to whatever extent you have that autonomy, you don't
want to use that autonomy to make serendipity inherently the enemy.
(28:45):
One of the ways that I seek to sort of
operationalize that I guess in my working life is to
relate to another chapter in the but where I talk
about this kind of three or four hour rule of creativity,
where you see all the way through history, great creative
people are choosing to spend about three or four hours
a day on their core activity if they have the
(29:07):
freedom to do that, and then everything else and the
rest of the time. So something I try to do
to emulate that is like, Okay, I'm going to try
really hard to ring fence several hours in the morning
for writing, very few exceptions to that. That tends to
work best for my energy. So I'm trying to keep
that time free, to try to exert quite a lot
of control over time. But the crucial flip side of
(29:28):
that is I'm not going to try to do that
with the rest of the working day or the evening.
I'm going to say, okay, after lunch or however I
do it. Then I am just more open to things.
Then I'm willing to make more appointments and willing to
be I'm going to be interrupted. I'm going to have
my phone on the desk so that i can respond
to messages. So that I think is a way of
(29:49):
kind of finding the balance between structure and serendipity.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
I really like that. It feels like instead of I guess,
like a rigid time boxed schedule, which in a way
is not particularly resilient. What you're describing feels like quite
an anti fragile kind of system, if you know what
I mean.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
I think that's a lovely way of putting it. I mean,
and now I want to say, in cal Newport's defense
now that he needs my defenses.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Certainly doesn't He's going quite fine that.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
I think I can imagine him saying now if he
was in this conversation too, that making a very clear
time blocked schedule for your day is not the same
point as saying I have failed if I adapt it right.
So in his like time block planning approach and everything,
there's always these extra columns to the right hand side
of the main time block for adapting and adapting is
(30:36):
the point. And I think there's something to be said
for the idea of a very clear plan, very loosely held.
For me, the way that works best is if there
are chunks of the day which are not specifically assigned
in advanced to specific tasks. But you know, maybe we're
all agreeing really here at the end of the day.
I do think that the thing I'm happy to sort
(30:57):
of be against is the idea that like setting it
up in your mind so that if reality unfolds in
ways that were not fully within your control, you've messed up,
because that's just like living in a world that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
The final thing I wanted to ask you, Oliver, is
just around your information diet, and you kind of touched
on it before and in terms of treating all the
things that we could be reading as a river as
opposed to a bucket that is filling up, and it
reminded me of this conversation I had with a friend
of mine who's in creative fields and does a lot
(31:32):
of writing, and she said to me a few years back,
she said, I've just had the realization I've done the
calculations of how many books I can read in a
year and probably how long my life will be, and
I've just realized I'm not going to have time to
read all the books that I want to read in
this lifetime. And that really stuck with me. And when
I read sort Of how you talk about sort of
(31:54):
there is infinite information out there, and for you as
a writer, and when your research books as well, how
do you decide what to read what to like, dedicate
your precious attention to.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, it's a fraud issue. I think that the approach
that I'm gradually but successfully sort of easing my way
into is just a much more fluid one. So it's
fluid in the sense of treating the list of potential
books as articles as a river. As we've spoken about
like picking from things and not feeling bad about the others.
Its treating individual books in that way, being willing to
(32:30):
read bits and not necessarily, you know, feel the burden
of having to complete them. I think also it's the
willingness to not try too hard to retain what you're reading.
There's this thing a foot everywhere now in sort of
personal knowledge management about how you've got to try to
remember everything you read. And I'm just like, maybe in
(32:52):
certain you know, if you're training in the law or
in medicine, there are context where you have to remember
the things that you read. In that way, the rest
of us don't need to do that. Right, you can
say that if something's relevant, it's going to stick to
some extent, and you know, if you forget about it,
then that's a filter, right, The fact that something stays
or doesn't stay tells you something about it's relevance. So
(33:12):
there isn't a sort of answer to how I choose
what to read other than what I feel drawn to
and learning to trust that sort of instinct of what
feels enjoyable and interesting and when a book feels like
it's like I'm done with it, even though I may
never finished it and all the rest of it. I
think that's the thing we need to cultivate.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
I love that, Oliver. I could continue talking for hours.
I love your work so much. There was just so
much wisdom in here. Sorry, I have a feeling I'll
be going back and rereading it and not trying to
remember anything, but just knowing that it's there if I
need it. So thank you so much for being here
very early. Hopefully the sun has risen, But thank you
(33:51):
so much for your time.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Slowly, slowly. Yeah, I knew it would be a pleasure,
and it was. Thank you so much. A month I've
enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
I hope you love this chat with Oliver as much
as I did. He shed so many nuggets of wisdom
that I am personally very excited to implement in my
own life. And if you want to learn more about Oliver.
I highly recommend checking out his new book, Meditation for
Mortals four Weeks to embrace your limitations and make time
for what counts. We've put links to that and his
(34:19):
website in the show notes. If you like today's show,
make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to
be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was
recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part
of the Coulan nation.
I am on a little break for a few weeks,
so I'm re releasing some of my favorite episodes from
the last twelve months. I will be back with brand
new interviews from July thirty one, and until then, enjoy
today's chat. In an effort to make time for ourselves,
many of us fallback on using to do lists and
time blocking. But often these sorts of strategies can end
(00:24):
up with the same result, getting lost in chasing productivity.
So how do we make time for the things that
truly count Joining me for a third time on How
I Work is Oliver Berkman, one of my favorite writers.
You might have come across Oliver through the international bestseller
four one thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, or his
(00:47):
regular columns for The Guardian, But what I love most
about Oliver's work is that he flips traditional productivity advice
on its head and gives a completely different way of
looking at how we use time. With his new book,
Meditation for Mortals four Weeks to Embrace Your limitations and
Make Time for What Counts, which is out now, Oliver
(01:09):
has been thinking a lot about how we can all
claw back time for the things that really matter. In
this episode. We explore the mindset you should be using
when you first approach a task if you want it
to be achieved easily, and why allowing yourself to be
distracted can actually create a positive result. We also chat
(01:32):
about the strategy you should be utilizing instead of a
to do list if you want to get the most
out of your day. Welcome to How I Work, a
show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day.
(01:52):
I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber. Oliver's new book, Meditation
for Mortals is packed full of wisdom and advice. I
wanted to know of everything that Oliver wrote about, which
pieces of advice really stuck with him and changed him
the most.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I seem not able to write anything other than what
feels most compelling to me on the day that I'm
writing it. And that applies to the whole book in
the sense that, like you know, these are the things
I have to grapple with, and then it applies on
the level of individual chapters through the process of writing
(02:32):
a book, so it feels like the answer that changes
every day basically, but in terms of specifics. This book
is organized into four weeks, as you know, and with
a sort of short chapter per day for each of
those weeks, not that I can control how people actually
read it, but that's the sort of idea. And the
third week in there is called letting Go, and it's
(02:53):
about the importance of learning to sort of let things
happen as a sort of compliment to making them happen,
and kind of unclenching from life a bit. And basically
all of that material is the stuff I sort of
needed the most at the point that I was putting
that together, and you know still now. So all that
stuff about, for example, the willingness to let things be
(03:14):
easy and not to sort of head into big projects
or life stages or anything like that with the kind
of assumption that they must be going to be grueling
and take a lot of unpleasant effort. That means a
lot to me, because it's still one of the ones
that I sort of grapple with the most.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
I suppose I love that I did write that down. Actually,
it's something I wanted to delve into because it's a
question that I sometimes think about, and I've written it here.
What if this might be a lot easier then I'd
been assuming, I think was the wording from the book,
and I was actually curious, like, well, how do you
apply it every day? But I also wanted to know
(03:51):
to this book project, and particularly following up on four
thousand Weeks, which was such a mega hit around the
world world, And I mean, you've written several books, and
so it wasn't like that second album syndrome they talk
about for musicians maybe this is like your fourth or
fifth album syndrome. But I wanted to know for this
project in particular, how did you apply that advice and
(04:13):
did you?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Well, No, it was a bit like second album syndrome,
because you know, it's true that I had written a
previous book, The Antidote, and also a collection of columns
called Help, which was a book and is a book,
But I hadn't had to write in the same way, right,
because it was just a question of collecting and editing
some previously written material. But certainly four thousand Weeks was
far and away the most sort of successful thing that
(04:35):
I'd written at the point that it was published. And
so yeah, I think there was a very sort of cliche,
a completely predictable and rather tiresome to talk too much
about phenomenon where I sort of froze a bit and
thought like, oh dear, now, if I mess up, more
people going to be watching. So I did kind of
a little bit to some extent, sort of freeze and headlights.
(04:55):
And it was interesting because it sort of brought into
my writing process a lot of the questions that I
was already focused on in what I wanted to put
into the book, and it sort of made them very,
very alive. And I've found this in the past, right,
something about the process of writing books will sort of
foreground the things that you're grappling with in the substance
(05:18):
of the book, and actually, you know, you end up,
I think, and I hope being able to express them
more authentically because you actually sort of have to go
through a version of that struggle to get the book written.
And I did have to find ways to allow the
possibility that it was more doable than I thought. But
the basic gist of that was to sort of keep
(05:38):
coming back and back and back. I don't think there's
a single way to flip the switch, but keep coming
back to this thought that maybe what I was ready
to do and able to do in terms of the
next paragraph in the next chapter was what needed to
be done, and now.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Just like in your day to day work, how do
you apply that principle of just having things be a
whole lot easier than you'd otherwise assume.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
I mean, a couple of things come to mind. One
is that I do think and I wish this wasn't
the case, but I do think that a lot of
these insights are just a matter of returning to them
and returning to them and returning to them and gradually
sort of strengthening the mental muscle that allows you to
remember them. So it's sort of catching yourself from one
(06:21):
minute to the next, and it's actually quite sort of
physical for me, right sort of I find that I'm
actually sort of tensed against the work. It's in my
musculature somehow. And catching yourself doing that and just sort
of stepping back from it and thinking like, oh, maybe
that's not necessary is very powerful maybe to get a
little bit more practical. The other thing that makes a
(06:42):
big difference there is the idea of really just thinking
about the very next thing and the very next thing,
so sort of using methods of productivity, methods of planning
the day, and there are lots of different ones that
having common this focus on like, Okay, what's the next small,
completable thing, the sort of radically doable little task that
(07:03):
I want to pick and then put into practice. Now
you can't do things like write a book or even
write a chapter. You can do things like that, come
up with a rough plan for the first half of
the chapter, and that's when I can get it down
underneath that threshold of what feels doable, back into that
easier way of working.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
I love that idea of picking the thing that feels
radically doable that will stick with me. I think something
else that this relates to, and I want to say,
this might have been in the Letting Go section is
around developing a taste for problems, and you write about
how we kind of go through life and think, oh,
(07:42):
one day all the problems will be gone and there
will just be no problems to deal with, but of
course we know that that is not the case. It's
like it's so simple, but it's also it's like it's
quite profound when you actually think about it. I want
to know, like, how does that work and resonate for you,
like on a day to day basis. Is it one
(08:02):
of those things that you do just keep coming back
to because I was very curious about that.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
I write in the book about this story that Sam
Harris tells about, you know, being a coffee. I think
it is at lunch with a friend one day and
going on and on about all the problems he was
addressing in his work or whatever it was, and her
interrupting him in mid flow and saying, hold on, are
you still under the impression you're going to get to
the part of your life where you don't have any problems?
(08:26):
And he sort of recounts the experience of realizing, like, oh, yes,
there is kind of something in the stance I've had
towards life that implies, yeah, not only that a given
problem might be difficult depending on its content, but that
like I shouldn't have problems. I'm trying to get through
to the point in life where there aren't problems. And
I sort of explain in the book why this isn't
(08:48):
going to happen, and you wouldn't want it to happen, right.
There are certainly specific kinds of problems that you wouldn't
wish on anybody, but the sort of sheer existence of
problems on some level is the synonymous of having meaningful work.
Ahead of you, but I try increasingly to have some
kind of direction, have some kind of vision. I don't.
It's not purely about just stumbling through the dark, but
(09:10):
not to try very hard to link that up to
moment to moment action. So I'm really trying. It's very
much a work in progress, but I'm really trying to
combine that idea of like having a fairly clear sense
of what I'm trying to create here with a very
very much more intuitive and spontaneous even sense of like, Okay,
(09:32):
what feels like the right thing to do next.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I want to talk about worrying, and you talk about
this idea of most of the bridges that we worry
about never end up being crossed. Can you tell me
more about that, and just on a day to day basis,
how do you live that? Because I really struggle with
that one.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Yeah, no, me too, And that's why it was interesting
for me to write about it. The It is kind
of fascinating, And I think one way of understanding worry
is that it's the sort of attempt by a human
being who is inherently limited to the present moment. One
of the many ways in which were limited is we're
sort of temporarily localized. We wish we could sort of
(10:16):
also be in the future checking up on it, making
sure that everything's going to be fine, but we can't,
and so worry is this sort of mental discomfort that
arises from trying to repeatedly sort of get out there
and secure a place in time that we're not actually
in and never are in. And you know, if I
wanted to get sort of evolutionary psychology about it, which
(10:39):
I don't usually want to do very much, but you know,
you could see how perhaps we sort of evolved in
an environment where where having that concern and then dealing
with it was something that happened in a very short order.
Like you hear a sound, you're worried about it, you
check it out, you realize it's no threat to your safety.
Now we live in this world that's been called a
you know, delayed return environment, where the thing you're worrying
(11:00):
about could well be whether how an editor will respond
to a pitch you've made sometime in the next four weeks,
or whether an attempt to purchase a house will go
through at some point in the next two months. You know,
all these kinds of slow things, whether worry just has
nowhere to go. It doesn't motivate a quick action to
get to deal with the worry. It just sort of curdle.
And I think the thing about crossing bridges is, yeah,
(11:21):
there's another way of making the same point. Really, we're
trying to sort of think through all the things that
could go wrong, think our way through what we do,
and reassure ourselves that that will have gone okay if
that happens. You can't ever be certain that something goes
okay until it's gone okay. So trying to cross bridges
before you get to them, in that sense, is just
(11:43):
a recipe for that kind of unpleasant, anxious state of constantly,
repetitively trying to do it and failing. There are all
sorts of ideas in cognitive therapy and elsewhere about you know,
scheduling a time of day in which to worry and
things like this, and I think it does help some
people to do something like that. The version of that
that I find helpful is to market date in my
(12:04):
calendar maybe three four weeks in the future, to sort
of remind myself to focus again on that topic. And
I find that knowing that that's there and it's coming
up in the calendar is incredibly powerful in terms of
enabling me to let go of it in the present.
If it's still a big issue four weeks from now,
then I will kick into worrying about it again. I
(12:25):
sort of on some level, I'm concerned that if I
were to stop worrying about it, I might completely forget
about it. Right, And it's wild, right as parents, if
you're worried about some issue with your child's welfare, like,
I'm not going to forget about that, It's ridiculous. But
some part of me doesn't trust myself. And it's like,
if I let go and just got into the thing
I was working on today, maybe like ten years later,
(12:48):
I'd be like, oh, no, everything's gone terribly wrong in
life because I completely failed to attend to this thing.
So putting that kind of three or four weeks ahead
thing in I find really effective because then I can
be like, okay, just in case I completely forget about
this important thing that will come back into my world.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
I love that I've experimented myself with having a worry
list and then setting a daily worry time and confining
my worrying to that time of day, and I found
that quite effective. But what I like about what you've
just suggested is that it's almost like a test of
a hypothesis. And the more and more you're like, if
everything you worry about you actually just put in the
(13:29):
diary to spend some time thinking about a couple of
weeks from today, and then every time you get to
those things, like nine times out of ten, you're going
to think, what was I even worrying about that never
eventuated into anything, which I feel then feeds, you know,
the like a more sensible hypothesis and theory that actually
(13:49):
I worry about things that I don't even need to
be spending time worrying about. So I really I enjoy that.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yes, and even in the one time out of ten, right,
then it comes around and you're like, Okay, what are
some the chances are you'll be in a better place
to just sort of figure out some actions that you
could take relative to it.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Yeah, yeah, now you're right. Even though you're I would
say an anti productivity guru, if that is a thing,
you do have some really good pieces of advice around
how we can I guess, make the best use of
our time and think differently about things. And I want
to talk more about this idea of treating your to
do list as a menu. Can you tell me more
(14:27):
about that?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
So I guess where this started off in my thinking
is in another chapter of this book, where I'm talking
about not to do lists, but like you're sort of
to read pile or your digital folder of articles save
to read later, and how not very much reflection on
how content works in the twenty first century will reveal
(14:49):
that this is essentially an endless list. The better technology
gets at filtering information, the more stuff we find coming
our way that we feel like we really need to
read or would be really important for our jobs or something.
And I wrote then about how it can be really
helpful to see that kind of collection of things not
as a bucket but as a river. Right, So this
(15:10):
is just an possibly helpful analogy, not as something you've
got to sort of deal with an empty but as
a sort of flow of things that goes by you,
and your only job is to pick a few things
that seem interesting and not to feel guilty about the
ones that go by. And I find that very useful
in my own approach to literally that topic. You know,
the four hundred articles that I've got stored in a
(15:32):
read it later app If I think that it's my
job to get through them, firstly, I won't approach them
in the most creatively helpful or enjoyable way. But secondly,
also like, that's not the end of it. There'll be
another four hundred in a short time. So treating them
as like, well, what actually still feels compelling and let
the rest go is much more powerful. But the more
(15:52):
I thought about this, the more I realized that you know,
in a sense, every list of things, even things that
feel much more obligatory than a to read pile, every
list of things has the same character because if there
are more things that you could meaningfully usefully do with
(16:13):
a day, then you will be able to actually do
with the day. Then you are, in fact picking items
for now and letting the rest go, whether you like
it or not. So to switch screech of breaks, to
switch metaphor into menus. The point there is that we
don't get stressed by a rest Most people anyway don't
(16:34):
get stressed by a restaurant menu. And if you do
get stressed, it's not because you think it's your job
to get through the whole list right at a single sitting.
The fact that a restaurant menu is long and you
get to pick a few things from it is kind
of the point of a restaurant menu and what makes
it pleasurable. And you can actually see that the same
thing applies to our to do lists, right because obviously
a lot of the things we're going to be doing
(16:56):
are not necessarily going to be as fun as eating
a delicious meal. But if there's more more that we
could do than we're going to get to do in
a day, then by definition, what you're doing when you
look at a do list is picking a few items
and choosing a few things that feel most compelling, most important,
most meaningful, and not expecting to get through the whole
(17:16):
of it. And there is quite a deep potential shift here,
which is summed up in that sort of familiar phrase.
But it's not that the items on a list, when
you viewed like that, stop being things that you have
to do and become things that you that you get
to do. You get to pick from a menu, and
we do get to pick from our to do lists. Again,
we may decide that certain things that we're going to
(17:39):
pick us kind of unpleasant. In the same way that
I suppose you might pick a extremely healthy side dish
and a menu that you didn't particularly like because actually
it's part of your long term goal to eat healthily.
But there is something really important in letting go of
that notion that you've failed unless you get through the list.
And I think that seeing and understanding our list as
infinite is the way to do that, because then just
(18:00):
like that's not happening.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Something else I really liked as an idea in this
book is around setting a quantity goal. Can you tell
me more about that, because I think that's particularly interesting
for knowledge workers like us.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah, so you know, there are other contexts in which
the idea of quantifying your life and measuring everything you
do can be quite sort of detrimental, and I sort
of don't recommend it, but I'm always one for picking
the right technique for the context and contradicting myself wherever
I feel like it. And the context of quantity goals,
I think that if you do any kind of creative work,
(18:38):
and that I would define very broadly, there is this
tendency to set things up in your mind so that
you can never feel like you've done something well enough,
or that you've done it to a sufficiently high quality.
So the way that you sort of, or the way
that I sort of naturally, if I don't catch myself,
proceeds as a writer is sort of to sit there
(19:00):
staring at the screen waiting for something really good to
occur to me. Finally, maybe it does, and I type
it out, and then I sort of judge it again
and realize it is in. I delete half of it,
and you sort of make this incredibly halting progress over
the page. And it's actually antithetical to high quality anyway,
because the way to get to high quality is to
(19:22):
is to allow things to flow and then pick from
what flows out. So the idea of a quantity goal
is just that it gives the part of your brain
that wants to think in terms of goals and progress
and productivity something to do. But it's something to do
that sort of doesn't get involved in the quality arguments.
So for someone writing, this could be simply a question
(19:43):
of like, my next job is to add two hundred
words to this, or my next job is to write
for an hour today, or you know. And the most
sort of purely quantity form of this is the kind
of free writing exercise that I was talking about before,
where you might just say, like, I'm setting a timer
for ten minutes, and the only rule is that I'm
(20:04):
not going to stop typing or writing for that ten minutes,
and you know that is not going to create the
final draft of a publishable book. But that's not the point.
The point is to stay in this world of letting
things flow out to see what there might be to
be worked with. So I find there's something really sort
of something that really sort of removes the drama from
(20:28):
things by setting a quantity goal, because the other problem
with the quality goal is that it's really hard to express,
like what does it even mean to say, I'm going
to try and write this chapter as well as I
possibly can, or really excellently, or as well as the
last one. These are just kind of endlessly flexible definitions
that you will by default flex in the direction of
(20:48):
feeling bad about yourself. Yeah. So, I'm very often in
my creative work, either sometimes literally writing it down, sometimes
it's just in my mind, but I'm thinking, like, Okay,
what I'm doing now next is a twenty minute brain
dump on this topic. What I'm doing next is filling
a single page with a little structure diagram because that's
(21:11):
how I work. But the point about the quantity there
is it's like filling a single page. It's not getting
the perfect structure, and so on and so on.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
We will be back with Oliver soon and when we return,
we'll be discussing why being open to distractions can be
beneficial and the strategy you can use instead of a
to do list to make the most of your day.
If you're looking for more tips to improve the way
you work can live. I write a short weekly newsletter
(21:39):
that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally.
You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com.
That's Amantha dot com. I feel like this dovetails perhaps
into running a done list at the end of the day,
(22:00):
and I think it's fairly self explanatory perhaps, but maybe
I'd love you to talk about how you use a
done list and perhaps what it is in your work.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, I would say, well as a list you keep
through the day, probably rather than necessarily just at the
end of the day. So, and this is very adaptable.
You know, if there are people listening and watching who
have really complicated, tricked out task management systems like I'm
not suggesting throwing that away. It's just a question of
building this in and making sure that it's got a role,
just a role for recording proactively for things that you
(22:32):
do as you do them, so that you as well
as a to do list, or instead of a to
do list, you're also creating this list of your accomplishments
through the day that gets longer and longer as the
day goes on, which I mean to do lists often
tend to get longer and longer as the day goes
on as well, but that's a problem. This is a
good thing, right, the longer you have done with better
And as I've say in the book, you know, it's
(22:54):
a very simple intervention, but I think it is so
powerful because it invites you to compare your output, not
to infinity, which is what we're usually doing, that all
the things we could yet do that would be useful
if we could do them, but to zero. It's implicitly
it's like, you know, here's what I've done compared to
if I stayed in bed and done nothing today. So
(23:17):
you know, I definitely cycle through the ways I'm actually
doing this in my own life, and actually, maybe that's
something to talk about I'm glad that I do that
now I'm not in search of the final rigid system
in the way that I definitely used to be. But
one way that you can put this into practice, obviously
is just writing. Is just you know, adding items to
(23:39):
a piece of paper as you go through them. If
I'm in more of a sort of a motivational rut,
I will sometimes pair this with another approach. So what
I'll do is, I'll it's going to sound very silly
when I put it into words, but you know, I
will in a notebook, on one page, write down a
task that I to do, do the task, cross it out,
(24:04):
and then write it down on a different page as
being done. Right, so you have a list of the
things that you're doing. You just added one task at
a time, and then a list of the things that
you've done. I mean, I'm willing to be told that
this is kind of dumb on some level, but I
find it it's really it's really helpful for just sort
of focusing when you're feeling like you lack focus, and
(24:26):
just finally on the done list. I mean, one thing
that people have said and that I think I have
once or twice found myself as well, is that if
you're in a really low place, like if you're really
in a kind of like I can't quite make myself
get out of bed kind of psychological place in life,
which does happen, you can just lower the bar for
what counts as something to be added to your done list. Right,
there is something weirdly motivational, something that gets the ball
(24:50):
rolling about keeping a list in a notebook where you say,
you know, took a shower, made coffee, things that you
wouldn't normally qualify as counters accomplishments because two below the
level of significance. But if you do that, you know
you don't need to show anyone else this list. You can.
You can burn it at the end of the day,
and very swiftly people find that it snowballs. Right that
(25:11):
you find that if you see, oh, actually, okay, this
narrative inside me that says I'm totally useless, I've already
done like five effective things today, and yeah, maybe one
of them was brush my teeth, but like, okay, maybe
two or three hours later, I'll have graduated to answering
some emails.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
That's so good. Something that I was thinking about after
I read it around. You know, there's a section around
staying distractible, which of course is the antithesis to a
lot of productivity advice out there. And I know that
you're a fan of Cal Newport in deep work and
the idea of having blocks of uninterrupted, deep focused time.
(25:52):
So I was really curious as to how do you
apply this idea of being open to distractions and interruptions
rather than feeling frustrated with them or with children that
come in and interrupt work.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
I mean, yeah, it's funny, I sort of. I did
a podcast with Cal just a few weeks ago, and
I sort of really enjoy exploring this sort of tension point.
The conversation between us tends to be like I say, like, well,
you know, but it's really grueling and hard to try
to impose that level of schedule of your life, and
Colsponts is like, yeah, but it's worth it. So, like,
you know, buck up. On some level, this is not wrong.
(26:31):
I'm not sort of against the deep work approach. I'm
not against time blocking in the sense that he teaches
it at all. A lot of this is to do
with navigating against one's personality and figuring out where you're
most likely to sort of get too rigid and clamp
down and taking the opposite approach as a kind as
an antidote to that. So, but what I'm talking about
(26:51):
there is this notion that it's really easy, I think,
or for some people people like me, to kind of
make things worse for themselves by trying to sort of
stick to a schedule so rigid that more things get
defined as distractions, and distractions all feel worse when they
do happen, or interruptions, And that distraction, I guess, is
(27:14):
an internal kind of interruption, and then the other kind
is people coming into the room or whatever. So the
example I give him the book. You know, if it's
an afternoon when it's not my turn for school pickup
and I'm working at home and my son burst into
the room to tell me about something that he's done
at school that day, there might be contexts where the
right thing for me to do is to stop and
(27:35):
take a breath and explain that actually, I can't listen
right now and I will be free later. That I
might be working on something urgent, I might be in
a conversation with somebody. This could happen in the next
five minutes it'll be interesting to see. But I don't
want to have a productivity system that has defined this
period as so importantly devoted to rigid focus that by definition,
(28:00):
that lovely thing that life is supposed to be about
is defined as a problem. I'm not saying it will
never be something that needs to be managed in that way,
but like, don't default to that. Don't start from the
position that unexpected things happening must be bad. I think
that is the risk of sort of overly investing in schedules. Obviously,
(28:20):
there'll be people in the audience here who may say, well,
you know, my schedule is you know, there are lots
of professional roles in which your schedule is more dictated
than that, right, if you've got appointments, if you're working
as a teacher, or working in sort of lots of
different settings where there's kind of a scheduled aspect to it.
But to whatever extent you have that autonomy, you don't
want to use that autonomy to make serendipity inherently the enemy.
(28:45):
One of the ways that I seek to sort of
operationalize that I guess in my working life is to
relate to another chapter in the but where I talk
about this kind of three or four hour rule of creativity,
where you see all the way through history, great creative
people are choosing to spend about three or four hours
a day on their core activity if they have the
(29:07):
freedom to do that, and then everything else and the
rest of the time. So something I try to do
to emulate that is like, Okay, I'm going to try
really hard to ring fence several hours in the morning
for writing, very few exceptions to that. That tends to
work best for my energy. So I'm trying to keep
that time free, to try to exert quite a lot
of control over time. But the crucial flip side of
(29:28):
that is I'm not going to try to do that
with the rest of the working day or the evening.
I'm going to say, okay, after lunch or however I
do it. Then I am just more open to things.
Then I'm willing to make more appointments and willing to
be I'm going to be interrupted. I'm going to have
my phone on the desk so that i can respond
to messages. So that I think is a way of
(29:49):
kind of finding the balance between structure and serendipity.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
I really like that. It feels like instead of I guess,
like a rigid time boxed schedule, which in a way
is not particularly resilient. What you're describing feels like quite
an anti fragile kind of system, if you know what
I mean.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
I think that's a lovely way of putting it. I mean,
and now I want to say, in cal Newport's defense
now that he needs my defenses.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Certainly doesn't He's going quite fine that.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
I think I can imagine him saying now if he
was in this conversation too, that making a very clear
time blocked schedule for your day is not the same
point as saying I have failed if I adapt it right.
So in his like time block planning approach and everything,
there's always these extra columns to the right hand side
of the main time block for adapting and adapting is
(30:36):
the point. And I think there's something to be said
for the idea of a very clear plan, very loosely held.
For me, the way that works best is if there
are chunks of the day which are not specifically assigned
in advanced to specific tasks. But you know, maybe we're
all agreeing really here at the end of the day.
I do think that the thing I'm happy to sort
(30:57):
of be against is the idea that like setting it
up in your mind so that if reality unfolds in
ways that were not fully within your control, you've messed up,
because that's just like living in a world that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
The final thing I wanted to ask you, Oliver, is
just around your information diet, and you kind of touched
on it before and in terms of treating all the
things that we could be reading as a river as
opposed to a bucket that is filling up, and it
reminded me of this conversation I had with a friend
of mine who's in creative fields and does a lot
(31:32):
of writing, and she said to me a few years back,
she said, I've just had the realization I've done the
calculations of how many books I can read in a
year and probably how long my life will be, and
I've just realized I'm not going to have time to
read all the books that I want to read in
this lifetime. And that really stuck with me. And when
I read sort Of how you talk about sort of
(31:54):
there is infinite information out there, and for you as
a writer, and when your research books as well, how
do you decide what to read what to like, dedicate
your precious attention to.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, it's a fraud issue. I think that the approach
that I'm gradually but successfully sort of easing my way
into is just a much more fluid one. So it's
fluid in the sense of treating the list of potential
books as articles as a river. As we've spoken about
like picking from things and not feeling bad about the others.
Its treating individual books in that way, being willing to
(32:30):
read bits and not necessarily, you know, feel the burden
of having to complete them. I think also it's the
willingness to not try too hard to retain what you're reading.
There's this thing a foot everywhere now in sort of
personal knowledge management about how you've got to try to
remember everything you read. And I'm just like, maybe in
(32:52):
certain you know, if you're training in the law or
in medicine, there are context where you have to remember
the things that you read. In that way, the rest
of us don't need to do that. Right, you can
say that if something's relevant, it's going to stick to
some extent, and you know, if you forget about it,
then that's a filter, right, The fact that something stays
or doesn't stay tells you something about it's relevance. So
(33:12):
there isn't a sort of answer to how I choose
what to read other than what I feel drawn to
and learning to trust that sort of instinct of what
feels enjoyable and interesting and when a book feels like
it's like I'm done with it, even though I may
never finished it and all the rest of it. I
think that's the thing we need to cultivate.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
I love that, Oliver. I could continue talking for hours.
I love your work so much. There was just so
much wisdom in here. Sorry, I have a feeling I'll
be going back and rereading it and not trying to
remember anything, but just knowing that it's there if I
need it. So thank you so much for being here
very early. Hopefully the sun has risen, But thank you
(33:51):
so much for your time.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Slowly, slowly. Yeah, I knew it would be a pleasure,
and it was. Thank you so much. A month I've
enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
I hope you love this chat with Oliver as much
as I did. He shed so many nuggets of wisdom
that I am personally very excited to implement in my
own life. And if you want to learn more about Oliver.
I highly recommend checking out his new book, Meditation for
Mortals four Weeks to embrace your limitations and make time
for what counts. We've put links to that and his
(34:19):
website in the show notes. If you like today's show,
make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to
be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was
recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part
of the Coulan nation.
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